Introduction–The Law of Attraction

Each morning, I read from three books to align my thinking according to some specific goal I have for my personal growth each day. Currently those books are:

• Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This book explores how to more intentionally achieve the mental state of “optimal experience” and, thus, improve the quality of life experience by managing consciousness to ensure happiness.
• Law of Attraction, by Michael J. Losier. This short book provides a practical guide to the application of the Law of Attraction to manifest our desires intentionally in our lives.
• Real Magic, by Wayne W. Dyer. This book focuses on how to create miracles in every day life, starting with the recognition that we are spiritual beings having a human experience and using our spiritual nature to affect change in our human existence.

These three books provide different views of the same phenomena rooted in the truth that our life experiences and what we perceive to be the quality of them is exclusively controlled by our own minds. Events that happen in our lives have no intrinsic meaning. Rather, we attach meaning to events, and that process shapes not only our human experience but the basis upon which we make future decisions about intent and how we choose to expend our psychic energy.

All three of these books make the point that at every moment of every day–and, after all, we always only have the present moment in which to act and have experience–we make decisions (consciously or unconsciously) about what enters our consciousness and how what we give attention to will affect us. Our happiness throughout a lifetime–or at any particular moment–is exclusively dependent on these decisions and nothing else. We control our own lives in every conceivable aspect.

3 Steps in Intentional Exercise of Law of Attraction

The intentional exercise of the Law of Attraction can be broken down to the following three steps:

1. Identify your desire. One must clearly identify what they want, and that desire must be logical.
2. Give your desire focus and attention. Next, one must gives desires positive attention, energy, and focus.
3. Allow it. Simply put, one must believe fervently that the Law of Attraction is working for them to attract what has been identified, removing all doubt and other negative vibrations caused by other negative emotions.

What one allows into their awareness dramatically affects one’s ability to exercise these three steps successfully–especially the third. Emotions are an important indicator as to the degree with which we are succeeding in this effort. Negative emotions block the law from working for us, which positive emotions feed into the law to bring forth our intentions much faster.

The Elements of Enjoyment

Our emotional state is an important part of our realization of happiness. We must enjoy the moments in our lives in order to be happy, so properly defining what enjoyment actually means is critical. In exercising the second step of the Law of Attraction, a task list usually emerges where we give focus and energy to the steps involved in creating things in our lives. We must derive enjoyment in these tasks to continually feed both the management of our positive mental state as well as the Law itself. In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, identifies the following 8 “Elements of Enjoyment” based on a worldwide psychological study he conducted regarding the nature of optimal experience:

1. We must choose tasks and goals we have a chance of completing–thus logical.
2. We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Give focus in the absence of negative emotions or experience.
3. The goal must be clear.
4. The task associated with the goal must provide feedback. This ensures that concentration can be maintained.
5. One acts with a deep but effortless involvement the removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of every day life.
6. One has a sense of control over their actions.
7. Concern for self disappears, yet reappears more strongly once the goal is achieved.
8. The sense of duration of time is altered. Hours pass like minutes, and minutes slow down to seem like hours.

A Convergence of Ideas

Wayne Dyer’s book follows up with a discussion of the 14 keys to a miracle mindset, which I will talk about more extensively in another post, but my point here is to highlight the convergence of the ideas from three different books coming from different perspectives to a single concept. That concept is the fact that our lives are executed in our own minds, and we have complete control over the nature of our life experience by exercising control over consciousness–what we pay attention to, what we intend, and what we allow to affect us negatively or positively.

Eliminating the Negative

Negative emotion and “psychic entropy” (as Flow describes it) is our biggest enemy, and much of this negativity is rooted in false beliefs about ourselves that introduce doubt, thus preventing the exercise in the third step of the Law of Attraction. Consistently redirecting our thoughts away from doubt and other negative emotion is a key component to consistently ensuring a high quality of life and achieving the things we want.

The following quote is a terrific one that highlights how the way you think of yourself affects your reality and your experience in it:

“Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should go and say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week.’ Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.”–Joseph Campbell

Think on the positive things about yourself and your life each day, and you will experience more of those things as a matter of law. Law of Attraction.

This quote for today resonates with me, because it provides clues to the true natural of spirituality and the continual journey of spiritual awakening:

“The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning one’s self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.”–Aldous Huxley

About the Author

Aldous Huxley was an English writer best known for writing novels, including Brave New World–a futuristic novel set in the year AD 2540 (530 years from now). He was widely regarding as an intellectual, humanist, and pacifist as well as a philosopher.

What this means for me today…

I am currently reading a book by Deepak Chopra called The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life. This morning, I read Secret #6, which is titled “Freedom Tames the Mind.” Without basically regurgitating the whole chapter here, the general point is that our growth along the path of our spiritual journey is many times constricted by our thoughts regarding the collection of choices we have already made in our lives–and the judgments we have placed on them. Because the results of those choices–whether considered good or bad by our judgment–actually contain elements of both when fully analyzed, we are bombarded with a plethora of conflicting lines of thought referred to as samkaras, the Sanskrit word for “to flow together.” These “grooves in the mind” makes future thoughts flow in the same direction. This prevents us from actually exercising “free will” in decision making or “living in the moment,” as is so important in spiritual growth. We are, in effect, imprisoned by our past in this way, the problems associated with conflicting lines of thought based on an inaccurate perception of past events are many.

The Connection

The connection my reading and this quote lies in the answer suggested at the end of the chapter. The goal of the solution is to free the mind from these past considerations, so one can exercise free will, live in the moment, and make a “choice as if making it for the first time.” One might say that this might lead to a person repeating past mistakes, which is the common irrational fear, but this is prevented by discovering the part of one’s self–the Inner Self–that resides inside each of us and always knows the right answer. The “samskaras” from our past sit in between our true selves and the real answer–and need to be cleared away, so we can be free. Thus spiritual awakening occurs as a function of self discovery–the realization that we already have the answers we seek. We just need to look in the right place. With the right intent, even decisions that might be considered “bad” are reworked by the Universe that responds to our intent and can make “lemons into lemonade.”